


Eidari

by Joysweeper



Series: Crucibles [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemon, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-01
Updated: 2012-11-01
Packaged: 2017-11-17 12:21:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/551523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joysweeper/pseuds/Joysweeper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of short stories set in a version of the Galaxy Far, Far Away in which the Force is entangled with Dust, and humans and some near-humans have dæmons, animal-shaped manifestations of their consciousness or souls.</p><p>Luke and his dæmon, Peregrine, are weird and always have been, but they do have one friend who doesn't seem to care. However, there are limits to that acceptance.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eidari

High, high above, something with the wide-winged shape, wedge-shaped tail, and massive size of a bonegnawer circled endlessly. Its feathers were strikingly pale, and if viewed through macrobinoculars or by a sharp-eyed dæmon its head and feet looked yellowish and nothing like a bonegnawer's.

Like the rest of his family, Luke and Peregrine were used to seeing it. It wasn't there all the time or every day, but... often, for as long as they could remember. Uncle Owen and Auret ignored it studiously. Aunt Beru and Ullis usually shrugged. Last year, when no one had been around to stop them, Peregrine had taken bonegnawer form herself, Luke had clung to her back, and they'd tried to fly up to see it. But she could only take the form of a _young_ bonegnawer, and while Luke was small for his age, he was still more than she could get into the sky with. There were offworld animals big enough to do it, and they'd tried, but his weight still slowed her enough that the mystery bird always avoided them easily.

They hadn't tried to catch it for months now, but every time Luke and his dæmon went outside they checked for it. It was kind of nice, when it was up there. Comforting. They hadn't felt right, the times they'd gone a week or so without seeing it.

Now, heading back towards the homestead, they had a moment of knowing and looked up, saw it tipping its wings to one side as it circled. Indicating a direction. Peregrine became a sandhawk and peered that way out of intense dark eyes, at a distant puff of sand out on the horizon. "I think it's Biggs. With a new speeder! He's here!"

They turned as one to Uncle Own on Auret. The morning’s chores were done and the day was heating up, and he hadn’t gone anywhere with Biggs in almost a week now. Surely it would be okay.

"Can I go? Please?" Luke pleaded. His uncle looked down on him from his dæmon's back, arms folded. Auret didn't give away any more than his expression did. When Peregrine dropped off Luke's shoulder to the sand and trotted up to her as a woodoo, tiny wings raised in entreaty, she stamped a padded eopie foot, but without any force.

"All right," Owen said grudgingly. Slightly more resigned, Auret added, "Be back before supper."

Luke was off and running before Biggs' landspeeder had come fully into view. Peregrine launched off the sand as a four-winged dwarf varactyl and buzzed about him. As they got farther she shifted into a hawk-bat, flying more smoothly with great sweeps of that form's powerful wings and outpacing him, getting right to the edge of their bond. She reached the speeder before he could, just after it stopped, and landed in the back as a tiny gibbit bird, panting with open beak in the heat of the suns.

“Maniac,” Eidari said, and opened one of her furred wing-cases so she could shade the other dæmon with a wing.

Biggs grinned and revved the engine as Luke clambered into the seat next to him. Five glorious years older than Luke, he could drive anything he wanted to, and as far as Luke was concerned he was _good_ at it, all of it. “C’mon, Luke, you’re so slow,” he teased as Luke buckled his safety harness.

“I’ll do better. This's new! Where are we going? Can we see the Needle again?”

“It’s used, actually, just new to _me_. And we’ll see what the weather’s like. I’m not going into any sandstorms if I don’t have to.” The speeder’s engine rumbled as Biggs pulled it through a dramatic sharp turn and accelerated away from the farm. Eidari hopped forwards and held her elongated shreev head along the floor for a moment, then turned to Peregrine. “Put on some weight, I’m not sure about the repulsors.”

The speeder had been perfectly level over the sand. When Peregrine filled most of the back with the towering red-scaled bulk of an akk dog pup, it slowed and dipped, the back end going lower than the front, and something in the engine whined. Luke winced and twisted in his seat to look at her, saw the best approximation an akk dog had to expressing shame. The speeder tried to go level again, but couldn’t quite manage.

“Fast talking city grifters,” Eidari muttered, but Biggs shook his head. “We got what we paid for. Besides, there’s a _reason_ speeders for kids gotta be sturdier than ones for adults. Don’t look so guilty, you two, better to find out sooner than later.”

The speeder rocked again and sped faster as Peregrine shifted into a smaller form, their newest. She and Luke never felt comfortable in big forms, but they would do it to help Biggs and his dæmon. Eidari spent most of her time in winged offworld forms, these days. She was probably going to settle soon. Probably as that shreev, she wasn't anything else much these days.

Now she scuttled back to besides Peregrine and sat, segmented tail curled neatly, to survey Luke’s soul. “This is new. What are you, Pere?”

Peregrine was a formless lump of black inorganic something. The harsh light shone on her, calling up soft wisps of colors in her depths as she extended two tendrils and shrugged with them. “Dunno. I like it, though.”

“That can’t be right,” Biggs said, his eyes glazing over as he tapped Eidari’s senses, looked through her eyes. Luke eyed him nervously, but stopped himself; no way would they crash, there was nothing but flat sand here for kilometers. “It doesn’t work that way. You’re sure that’s not something you saw on the Holonet?”

“Yeah. It’s...” Luke bit his lip. It was kind of weird. Of any of his friends, Biggs was the least put off by Luke being weird, but Luke was always nervous bringing it up. After a pause Peregrine continued for him. “We saw it in a dream, so I tried it out when we woke up.” She did not describe the dream. “The suns feel nice.”

“Huh. What’d your uncle say?”

“Nothing. We haven’t shown him yet. You know he doesn’t like it when she takes offworld forms.” It was completely random and unfair, and Luke still felt guilty, like he was keeping a secret.

Eidari tilted her head. Without further warning she shifted, and for an instant there were two identical dark opalescent blobs in the back of the speeder, just barely touching. Biggs flinched with his whole body, his hands tightening on the wheel, white knuckled even as his dæmon became a shreev again. “Ei,” he croaked.

The speeder stopped and Eidari clung to the back of the seat with all six legs, laying her head against the side of Biggs’ face. Luke sweated a little harder without the wind of their movement to cool him off, but his best friend didn’t seem to notice the heat. He looked shaken.

Peregrine moved, producing tentacles with which to push herself over Luke’s seat, down over his shoulder and into his lap, where she put loops of herself around his wrists and in his hands, so they could squeeze. Biggs was never shaken, not really. He and Eidari had been in a speeder wreck once, and Luke remembered him joking about it even as his dæmon stuck to his side and trembled.

“I don’t see why you would take that form,” Eidari said at last. As an attempt to be casual, it failed, but Luke was just glad they were actually talking. “I mean, it’s blind.”

“...I like it.” Peregrine’s voice was small. They wanted to argue, but couldn’t. She shifted into a big-beaked neekocheep, claws prickling against Luke’s clothing. He saw Biggs and Eidari relax, as if they’d been watching her out of the corners of their eyes.

Biggs coughed, cleared his throat. The speeder lurched under them as it accelerated suddenly, tearing off across the desert. When he said anything, it was completely unrelated, the story of how he’d bought this landspeeder. Luke nodded and said the appropriate things at the right moments, and noticed that Eidari did not return to the back.

He stroked Peregrine’s feathers, feeling alone. They couldn’t say that she wasn’t blind in that form, not really. When she was that mystery creature she couldn’t see what Luke could, not colors and the way light bounced off objects, but she could 'see' the energy pouring from the suns, what was harnessed by the speeder’s engine, the energy in movement, and especially the golden flicker in humans and dæmons.

When she was in that form it reminded them of something they'd dreamed about, or saw when they were barely awake - the gold in everything, at all times, pulsing and flowing slowly as if the galaxy had a heartbeat, and all things breathed together.

Biggs could tolerate a lot of weird from his younger friend, Luke sensed, but that was too much. Besides, they probably hadn’t felt it the same way. It had been a long time since Eidari had taken a blind form, a shredder bat, but back then, she’d been distasteful, not... whatever this was. Luke didn’t want to call it terrified. Biggs was never afraid.

Luke promised himself that Peregrine wouldn’t take that form again, not if it was that disturbing, but as she met his eyes with the beady ones of the neekocheep they had another knowing. They knew it wasn’t a promise they’d be able to keep.

They looked skywards and saw the not-a-bonegnawer, keeping pace with them high above.

**Author's Note:**

> "Peregrine" is a name from legend in Star Wars - a man who was cursed to wander for eternity and never come home. These two are _young_ , right now, and think it's a grand story, so they chose it. On Earth, in English, it's attached to a certain kind of falcon, but on its own it means wandering or traveling, not native, foreign.
> 
> "Eidari" is an invented word with aspects of eidetic and eidolon. So - clarity, sight, idealism.


End file.
